i’ve seen love from both sides now
by
Douglas Messerli
Catherine
Breillat (original concept, scenario, adaptation and dialogue, with Sylvie
Pialat, Jacques Fieschi, and Maurice Pialat), Maurice Pialat (director) Police
/ 1985, USA 1986
French
director Maurice Pialat’s 1986 film, Police, shows just how close those
who protect us and those would rob or kill us truly are.
Gerard Depardieu as police detective
Mangin begins the film by interviewing a Tunisian drug smuggler, as the two
seem more engaged in an endless dialogue than in any true discovery of what the
drug runner and his Tunisian crime family has actually done.
Indeed, as the movie progresses, and
Mangin moves on to question more and more of the family, he becomes increasingly
involved with the criminals, involving them in his attempts to help him
accomplish his policing.
Eventually he even falls in love with one
of the crime family’s lovers, Noria (Sophie Marceau), herself suspected of
drug-dealing, revealing that this hard-nosed cop, deep-down, is a total
romantic—which today we might even describe as a serial sexual-abuser, at one
point dragging Noria into the police station to have furtive sex with her among
the file cabinets containing, presumably, the history of criminal histories.
Later, Mangin meets with a young teenage
prostitute (Sandrine Bonnair) from a frightful family, and with hardly innocent
intentions plaintively chastises her for the fact that she decclares she has
never been in love: ''You're 19 and you don't believe in love!''
Another evening he even parties with the
lawyer who has been able to convince a judge to free the drug dealer.
Yet Pialat presents these cross-over relationships with the “good” and the “bad” with a surprising complacency, never truly judging his characters. The director almost seems to indicate that this is just the way things are.
When you daily deal with criminals some
of their behavior is bound to rub off; and perhaps the criminals know more
about the justice system than we ever might. In short, each live off of one
another, or, at least, need each other in order to survive.
Without deceit a police detective would
no longer have a job; and without perceiving how deceit functions those who
rush out to destroy our lives would not ever know how to proceed.
In a sense, this film reminds me a little
of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Politsit, adj. (Police, adjective) from
2009, about a different kind of policeman who was forced by the very bureaucracy
within which he worked to destroy a young boy’s life simply for smoking a
little bit of pot.
Yet in this film the crimes are much
more heinous and terrifying. The Tunisian drug family members are obviously
involved in far more serious drugs. And the police detective, although he does
appear to do his job, also ambiguously moves in and out of moral grounds.
One might even argue that Mangin,
himself, is “hooked,” not on drugs, but on love, as Pialat makes it clear that
this widower is so very lonely that he simply cannot help himself from falling
in love with his enemies. As much as he may attempt to bring them into his
community in order to help, he also contaminates his activities.
Obviously, we have all long known that there is often a thin line between those who protect us and those who prey on us. Soldiers become killers; policeman are often tempted to take advantage of their powers. Racism, murder, and mayhem accompany even the best police departments all over the world.
Pialat’s film simply presents this as a
fact, as we come to sympathize, as in Jean-Pierre Melville’s films, with both
sides of the picture. Police is not so very much about those brave men
in uniform who come to our side in times of danger, but about the entire
activity of “policing” and what that means in real life. It’s not a sanitary
activity. All men and women are carriers, of sorts, of viruses that infect our
entire societies.
As US Westerns have long shown us, small-town
sheriffs often shoot others for absolutely no reason; yodeling cowboys killed
innocent men and women. Pialat’s excellent film might be described as a “thriller”
without any thrill.
Los
Angeles, April 27, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (April 2020).